Mail spam (unsolicited messages) has become a wide spread industrial problem for mail service providers. It not only greatly inconveniences the user but also wastes a mail service provider's resources to maintain and store large amounts of spam message data. In today's world, how well a mail service provider detects and filters spam messages has become a key attribute to the quality of service and ultimately to the economic success of the mail service provider.
As spam filters become more and more aggressive to combat the growing spam problem, the issue of false positives quickly becomes a problem. False positives may be defined as personal and non-spam email that is mistakenly classified as spam by the spam filter. Because of the potential for false positives, a User is often forced to regularly looking into a bulk folder, or the like, to make sure that they don't have any wanted emails misclassified as spam. This may become a time and resource drain for the email users.
Aside from email address forgery, it's an accepted common sense notion that any email sent from a contact in a user's personal address book is wanted by the user and should be given a “green light” to be deposited into a user's inbox folder. In some cases, a spammer could still forge an email address from the personal address book and send unsolicited emails to the user.
Additionally, for many email users, their address books are either empty or not large enough to become useful in the identification of most of the wanted emails. Therefore, there is a need in the industry to enable a more effective approach to managing email delivered to a user's inbox. Thus, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.